Shikinaisha and Ichinomiya: The Court's List and the Shrines Left Off It

The oldest record of the court managing shrines and taking a count is the Engishiki, a book of regulations from 927. It lists 2,861 shrines.

The shrines listed in the Engishiki are called "shikinaisha" (式内社), put simply, shrines recognized by the court. Japan was not unified across the country at that time, however, so countless shrines lay unrecorded in many regions. They are called "shikigesha" (式外社).

Each shikinaisha was given a rank, in four broad classes. The rank reflected political distance from the court.

So the court for the first time fixed the rank of shrines and made it a system. This is the "ancient system of shrine ranks." From then on the tendency was to venerate the high-ranking shrines named in the book. The exact date is unknown, but around the early eleventh century a different ranking system was made: the "medieval system of shrine ranks." It changed as follows.

- Ichinomiya (一宮): the shrine held to have the highest standing within a given region.

According to the provinces set up there, the court appointed officials called "kokushi" (国司), provincial governors, and on taking up the post a governor was bound to worship at the province's ichinomiya.

Remnants of the ichinomiya system remain in shrines today and exist in many places. In Kyoto they are Kamigamo Shrine and Shimogamo Shrine, in Nara Omiwa Shrine, in Osaka Sumiyoshi Taisha, and so on. So if you travel in Japan, I recommend worshipping first at the ichinomiya of any region before you travel the land.

The Meiji government had to build a state in Japan in a great hurry, to deal on equal terms with the modern states of the West. It declared that "shrines are for venerating the state," and began to destroy the shrines, that is the faiths, that had existed in such variety from place to place.

At this point a decisive event occurred. Having declared the role of shrines to be the veneration of the state, the government had to build a system that fit it. The officials revised the old ranking system and, of all things, set Ise Jingu at the apex of the shrine system.

In 1871, however, as the modern system of shrine ranks was put in place, the shrine name Kizuki Taisha, which named a place, was discarded. The shrine was renamed Izumo Taisha, taking the name of the province of Izumo, the very land that had been ceded to Amaterasu, who had been made the ancestral deity of the imperial line. The name of a place vanished and was replaced by the name of a territory. We have walked in exactly the opposite direction from that declaration, "not on trees or stones will I set my name, but on this land."